Introduction: axes of gender: divisions of labor and spatial separation / Bryna Goodman and Wendy Larson -- Part I: Patterns of mobility. Making sex work: polyandry as a survival strategy in Qing Dynasty China / Matthew H. Sommer ; The virtue of travel for women in the late empire / Susan Mann ; Gender on stage: actresses in an actors' world (1895-1930) / Luo Suwen ; Women on the move: women's kinship, residence, and networks in rural Shandong / Ellen R. Judd -- Part II: Spatial transformations. Between Nei and Wai: Chinese women students in Japan in the early twentieth century / Joan Judge ; Playing with the public: late Qing courtesans and the opera singer lovers / Catherine Vance Yeh ; Unofficial history and gender boundary crossing in the early Chinese republic: Shen Peizhen and Xiaofengxian / Madeline Yue Dong ; Gender and Maoist urban reorganization / Wang Zheng ; He Yi's The postman: the work space of a new age Maoist / Wendy Larson -- Part III: Boundaries. Women's work and the economics of respectability / Kenneth Pomeranz ; The vocational woman and the elusiveness of "personhood" in early republican China / Bryna Goodman ; Women's work and the boundary transgression in Wang Dulu's popular novels / Tze-lan Deborah Sang ; Virtue at work: rural Shaanxi women remember the 1950s / Gail Hershatter.